One Was a Woman, the Other a Man
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Anthony Warde
“One Was a Woman, the Other a Man”
A Psychoanalytic Study
of Sexual Identity in the Novels of Toni Morrison*
This paper explores the links between sexuality and subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s The
Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Paradise. The theories of Jacques Lacan and
Nancy Chodorow are employed to examine the anatomical and social / symbolic
factors that lead Morrison’s subjects to adopt a gendered self. Chodorow’s argument
that the mother’s gender and preoedipal relationship with her child have a profound
bearing on the child’s gender identity and subsequent sense of self is cited in ad-
dressing gender formation and male-female relationships in Morrison’s novels. La-
can’s view of gender formation as positioning the gendered subject in a particular
position in relation to language / the Symbolic system is also considered. Lacan’s
and Chodorow’s concepts are applied in a study of a number of issues pertaining to
sexuality and identity, including: homosexuality and ‘deviant’ sexuality as perceived
threats to normative patriarchal gender systems in The Bluest Eye and Paradise; the
discord apparent in male-female relationships in Morrison’s novels; and the margin-
alisation of mothers and women as ‘other.’
Throughout Morrison’s novels, sex, sexuality, and gender identity are sources of
uncertainty and struggle for both characters and communities. As the following pas-
sage from Paradise indicates, even a natural rock formation that resembles “[a] man
and a woman fucking forever”1 can become a site of sexual controversy and confu-
sion, a place where the social regulation and regularisation of the sexual identity and
interaction of subjects in Morrison’s novels are revealed:
* This paper draws on elements of my Master’s dissertation, “An Other and a Self: The Di-
vided Subject and the Dialectic of Identity in Selected Novels of Toni Morrison.” Full permis-
sion for the publication of this material has been granted by the Department of English at
Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.
1. Toni Morrison, Paradise (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 63.
The AnaChronisT 11 (2005): 270–293 ISSN 1219–2589“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
The committee members said their objections were not antisex at all but an-
tiperversion, since it was believed by some, who had looked very closely,
that the couple was two women making love in the dirt. Others, after an
equally careful examination (close up and with binoculars), said no, they
were two males – bold as Gomorrah.
Mikey, however, had touched the body parts and knew for a fact one was
a woman, the other a man.2
Although natural and neutral in itself, this geological landmark acquires social
significance and becomes an object of censure as it appears to bear some semblance
to human forms, and because it proves impossible to attribute “sexual” specificity to
either of these forms with any sense of certainty.
The attempt to assign sexual identity to an apparently anthropomorphic rock
formation reflects Nancy Chodorow’s observation that:
The social organization of gender, and people as sexed and gendered, are an
inextricable totality or unity: the social organization of gender is built right
into our heads and divides the world into females and males; our being
sexed and gendered (our sexuality and our gender identity) is built right
into social organization. They are given meaning one from the other.3
The “antiperversion” actions of the “committee of concerned Methodists” in
Paradise are mirrored elsewhere in Morrison’s works in the endeavours of parents
and authority figures to enforce and reinforce a system that produces heterosexual
subjects. As with any system, however, the organisation of gender identity in Morri-
son’s novels is far from flawless, since it is predicated upon laws which lend them-
selves to (gender-)bending and breaking. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts since
Freud have stressed, the subject’s sexual orientation and gender identity entail more
than the sum of mere body parts, and consequently frustrate any attempt to neatly or
naturally determine whether a subject is a woman or a man.
This paper will explore the links between sexuality and subjectivity in Toni Mor-
rison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Paradise. These works provide
examples of a number of sexual issues which may be addressed adequately within
the scope of this paper, while providing an analytical paradigm that can applied in a
reading of Morrison’s entire oeuvre. The psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan
2. Morrison, Paradise, p. 63.
3. Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven/London: Yale
University Press, 1989), p. 168.
271ANTHONY WARDE
and Nancy Chodorow will be employed both to examine the anatomical and social /
symbolic factors that lead Morrison’s subjects to adopt a gendered self, and to ad-
dress the various crises of identity such sexualised selves are constantly prone to.
Offering unique insights into the lives of Morrison’s protagonists, Lacan’s and
Chodorow’s theories are also inextricably tied to Freud, who, as Hortense J. Spillers
notes, eschews the issues of race, social standing, and political empowerment. Al-
though Freud’s Oedipal family is representative of the “sociometries of the bourgeoi-
sie household of Viennese society of [his] time,” he nonetheless writes “as if his
man/woman were Everybody’s, were constitutive of the social order, and that coeval
particularities carried little or no weight.”4 Since the racial and social “particulari-
ties” of Morrison’s protagonists weigh heavily on the gender identities they assume,
this reading of Morrison will rely upon writers who, like Spillers, challenge and cor-
rect traditional psychoanalytic theory at the same time as they highlight and employ
“the major topics of its field” which are not only relevant for but also “stringently
operative” in the African American community and in the works of African American
writers.”5
“The Body Parts”
He peed standing up. She squatting down. He had a penis like a horse did.
She had a vagina like the mare. He had a flat chest with two nipples. She
had teats like a cow. He had a corkscrew in his stomach. She did not. She
thought it was one more way in which males and females were different.6
We clearly lead an embodied life; we live with those genital and reproduc-
tive organs and capacities, those hormones and chromosomes that locate us
physiologically as male and female. But, as psychoanalysis has shown, there
is nothing self-evident about this biology.7
For Morrison’s protagonists, a sense of embodiment is intrinsic to the development
of a separate and singular self, and the recognition of bodily boundaries is essential
4. Hortense J. Spillers, “ ‘All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife
Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,” boundary 2 23.3 (Autumn, 1996) 75–141,
pp. 86–7.
5. Spillers, p. 87.
6. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (London: Vintage, 1977), p. 143.
7. Chodorow, Feminism, p. 101.
272“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
for the establishment and maintenance of a sense of psychical separation from oth-
ers and from the world at large. Such a sense of corporeal completeness and dis-
creteness, Jacques Lacan contends, is instilled in the “mirror stage,” the point at
which an infant first finds in its reflection or the image of another person a represen-
tation of its body as a totality. Previously plagued by the belief that its body was
composed of various parts it could neither connect nor control, the mirror stage in-
fant embraces its counterpart as a paragon of physical integrity and the source of its
sense of “self.”8
Reliant upon an external image rather than an inalienable inner certainty of self,
the subject’s feeling of physical stability is far from fixed. Accordingly, the countless
crises and uncertainties faced by Morrison’s protagonists are frequently accompa-
nied by feelings of physical fragmentation, merging, and/or incompleteness. Like
Milkman Dead in Song of Solomon, many of Morrison’s characters often feel that
their bodies lack “coherence, a coming together of the features into a total self.”9 In
light of the often unreliable or indeterminate ties between the corporeality and iden-
tity of the subject in Morrison’s fiction, it is not surprising that, in contrast to the
views of certain protagonists in Paradise, the question of whether a subject is – or
becomes – a man or a woman involves more than the “fact” that it has specific “body
parts.” As Dylan Evans notes, although the “anatomy/biology of the subject plays a
part in the question of which sexual position the subject will take up, it is a funda-
mental axiom in psychoanalytic theory that anatomy does not determine sexual posi-
tion.”10 Chodorow, similarly, emphasises that the manner in which the subject
“experiences, fantasizes about, or internally represents [its] embodiment grows from
experience, learning, and self-definition in the family and in the culture” which over-
see its socialisation.11 This view provides a valuable perspective on Pilate’s assump-
tion, in Song of Solomon, that her lack of a navel is a trait she shares with all women,
and is simply a sign of men and women’s anatomical and sexual difference.12
In The Bluest Eye, a similar uncertainty surrounding the navel and its link to
biological sex is revealed in the question posed by Pecola to Maureen Peal: “ ‘[I]f the
belly buttons are to grow like-lines to give the baby blood, and only girls have babies,
8. Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” The International Journal of Psycho-
analysis 34.1 (1953) 11–7, p.13.
9. Morrison, Song, pp. 69–70.
10. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Sus-
sex/Philadelphia: Brunner & Routledge, 1996), p. 179.
11. Chodorow, Feminism, p. 101.
12. Morrison, Song, p. 143.
273ANTHONY WARDE
how come boys have belly buttons?’ ”13 Pilate’s assumption that navels naturally be-
long to boys and not to girls, and Pecola’s bewilderment that both boys and girls have
them, indicate that the meanings each associates with particular body parts are nei-
ther natural nor innate. Rather, the significance with which they endow any body
part, particularly those that they associate with sexual difference and sexual repro-
duction, derives from their childhood experience and from their development in a
society that produces and is predicated upon heterosexual men and women.
Given Pilate and Pecola’s confusion as to which body parts are signs of sexual
difference, it is perhaps unsurprising that some of Morrison’s characters find that
although certain body parts may mark the difference between biological males and
females, they do not naturally endow the subject with masculine or feminine traits.
This is apparent from the sexual perversion and incertitude of Soaphead Church in
The Bluest Eye. Although Soaphead Church is biologically male, he is subject to con-
tinual struggle and evasion in his attempt to find both a sexual identity and gratifica-
tion for his “rare but keen sexual cravings”:
He could have been an active homosexual but lacked the courage. Bestiality
did not occur to him, and sodomy was quite out of the question, for he did not
experience sustained erections and could not endure the thought of some-
body else’s. And besides, the one thing that disgusted him more than entering
and caressing a woman was caressing and being caressed by a man.14
Soaphead’s convoluted path to patronage of little girls demonstrates that both
the development of sexual identity and the choice of a sexual object are fraught with
difficulties for the subject, for whom, Chodorow argues, the assumption of any sexu-
ality is always a compromise.15
Chodorow maintains that patriarchal society’s privileging of heterosexuality as
both normal and normative and its dismissal of other sexualities as pathological or
perverse is an invalid polarisation which is based on “ad hoc criteria” and misguided
assumptions. These include the belief in “biological normality” – the supposed en-
coding of sexuality in the body – and in the equivalence of sexual orientation and
gender roles.16 Consequently, while Shadrack’s eschewal of adult heterosexual rela-
tions and favouring of little girls may be perceived as perverse, such a view reflects
13. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Vintage, 1970, 1999), p. 54.
14. Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 131.
15. Nancy Chodorow, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (Ken-
tucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1994), pp. 34–5.
16. Chodorow, Sexualities, p. 66.
274“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
the idealisation and normalisation of heterosexual fantasies in patriarchal societies
rather than the inherent unnaturalness of Shadrack’s sexual orientation. As the ex-
perience and confusion of Morrison’s protagonists prove, any sexual identity is a
compromise and, consequently, no more normal than that which Shadrack adopts.17
Shadrack’s characterisation of boys as “scary” and “stubborn” and his view of girls
as being “usually manageable” draw attention to the fact that, apart from body parts,
sexual development for Morrison’s protagonists involves the recognition and assump-
tion of a socially constructed gender role, together with the traits that typify that role.
Chodorow argues that the patriarchal perpetuation of gender roles and the sexual divi-
sion of labour aim at feminine domesticity and docility and, conversely, at masculine
motility and forcefulness. These gender traits are also salient in men and women’s
assumption and provision of their appropriate parts in a cyclical system of reproduc-
tion.18 Surveying fictional families who “for one reason or another [escape] the impera-
tives of male dominance,” Jean Wyatt ventures that the oedipal stage is “not necessary
to development, [but] only to the maintenance of patriarchy. If the value system that
sustains male dominance did not require that girls learn to love submission and that
boys learn to derogate women and women’s work, there would be no oedipal stage.”19
While Wyatt’s suggestion is compelling, and follows from her identification of the cen-
tral role played by strong mothers in Morrison’s fiction, the patriarchal and gender
systems she sees as inevitable profoundly inform the lives of Morison’s protagonists.
In The Bluest Eye, the correlation between gender roles and reproduction is re-
flected in Pecola’s aforementioned confusion as to why “ ‘boys have belly buttons,’ ”
when “ ‘only girls have babies,’ ” and in the question she poses after her first men-
struation: “ ‘Is it true that I can have a baby now?’ ”20 Brooding over Pecola’s ques-
tion, Claudia consults the images of men and women circulated by society:
It would involve, I supposed, “my man,” who, before leaving me, would love
me. But there weren’t any babies in the songs my mother sang. Maybe that’s
why the women were sad: the men left before they could make a baby.21
17. Chodorow, Sexualities, pp. 34–5.
18. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology
of Gender, Second Edition (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press,
1999), p. 173.
19. Jean Wyatt, Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women’s Reading
and Writing (Chapel Hill/London: The University of North California Press, 1990), p. 215.
20. Morrison, Bluest Eye, pp. 54, 23.
21. Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 23.
275ANTHONY WARDE
Although the issues of gender roles and reproduction which confound Claudia
become most salient during and after puberty, they are, Chodorow insists, implicated
in the subject’s development from earliest infancy, and have a determining influence
on gender development.22 It is telling, then, that the “big, blue-eyed Baby Doll” that
Claudia receives at Christmas not only represents for her pervasive white ideals of
the body and of beauty, but also introduces her to the notion of “babies [and] the
concept of motherhood.”23 Similarly, the songs that Claudia’s mother sings form a
significant, if subtle, part of the patriarchal ideology of gender. Claudia’s interpreta-
tion of her mother’s songs as the laments of would-be mothers and the fact that
adults give her dolls in the belief that motherhood is her fondest wish are both symp-
toms of her development in a society in which “children of both genders [grow] up in
families where women, who have a greater sense of sameness with daughters than
sons, perform primary parenting functions.”24
Although by no means homogenous, the pattern of parenting and development
described by Chodorow is found throughout Morrison’s novels, where women are pri-
marily and often exclusively responsible for rearing children. The divergences between
masculine and feminine gender formation and the centrality of the mother’s role in
shaping these gender identities are evident in the portrayals of the Wright family in
Sula and of the Dead family in Song of Solomon. Both families are headed (nominally,
at least) by a predominantly absent father, while childrearing is carried out exclusively
by a mother. After giving birth to a daughter, Nel, Helene Wright “[rises] grandly to the
occasion of motherhood,” and discovers that her daughter is “more comfort and pur-
pose than she [has] ever hoped to find in this life.”25 Helene’s husband, Wiley Wright,
works as a ship’s cook on one of the Great Lake lines, and is “in port only three days out
of every sixteen,” thus leaving Helene alone to enjoy “manipulating her daughter,”
whose appearance and behaviour she seeks to alter to her satisfaction.26 Chodorow,
reviewing clinical studies by Fliess and others, finds that maternal manipulation and
interference typifies most mother-daughter relationships, and is attributable to the fact
that mothers “are the same gender as their daughters and have been girls.” As a conse-
quence, mothers “tend not to experience these infant daughters as separate from them
in the same way as do mothers of infant sons.”27
22. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 38–9.
23. Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 13.
24. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 110.
25. Toni Morrison, Sula (London: Vintage, 1973), p. 18.
26. Morrison, Sula, pp. 17–8.
27. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 109.
276“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
The experience of “prolonged symbiosis and overidentification” with the mother
causes the girl to develop anxiety as to her separateness and boundaries, a concern
which remains with her into adulthood.28 This disquiet is experienced by Nel, whose
friendship with Sula initially offers respite from her mother, but becomes a threat to
her sense of self when “they themselves have difficulty distinguishing one’s thought
from the other’s.”29 For Morrison’s male characters, on the other hand, the determin-
ing factor in gender development is typically not a continued identification with the
mother, but rather the emergence of Oedipal issues in the mother-son relationship.
Because of his gender, or, more accurately, his male physiology, the boy is treated by
the mother as “a definite other – an opposite gendered and sexed other,” and as a
substitute for the often absent father.30 Such substitution can be discerned in the
intimacy that initially marks Milkman and Ruth’s relationship in Song of Solomon.
“Long deprived of sex, long dependent on self-manipulation,” Ruth finds “physical
pleasure” in nursing her son, whom she views as “a beautiful toy, a respite, [and] a
distraction.”31 Physical pleasure is implicated not only in Ruth’s imagined unity with
her son (her sense that he is “pulling from her a thread of light”), but also in her link-
ing of her son to the “last occasion she had been made love to” by her husband.32
As well as determining the distinct Oedipal issues that Morrison’s male and fe-
male subjects must negotiate, the pattern of maternal omnipresence (and omnipo-
tence) and paternal absence in her novels also affects the manner in which these
characters assume a gender role through identification with the appropriate parent.
While the mother’s pervasive presence and over-identification may cause a daughter
such as Nel to develop anxiety regarding separateness and boundaries, this negative
effect is somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that the mother provides a model on
which the daughter can base her own feminine identity. “Insofar as a woman’s iden-
tity remains primarily as wife/mother,” Chodorow claims, “there is greater genera-
tional continuity in role and life activity from mother to daughter than there can be
from father to son.”33 This generational continuity from mother to daughter reveals
itself in the Wright household, where Helene treads a path that largely overlaps that
laid down by her grandmother. Raised under the “dolesome eyes of a multicoloured
Virgin Mary” (a cogent symbol of maternity and obedience), and counselled to be
28. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 137.
29. Morrison, Sula, p. 83.
30. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 104–5.
31. Morrison, Song, pp. 132–4.
32. Morrison, Song, pp. 13, 134.
33. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 175.
277ANTHONY WARDE
“constantly on guard for any sign of her mother’s wild blood,” Helene eventually
enjoys the privilege of “manipulating” her own daughter.34 Any childish enthusiasms
that Nel displays “[are] calmed by the mother until she [drives] her daughter’s
imagination underground.”35 Morrison conveys the extent to which Helene is sub-
sumed by the maternal role not only by describing her domineering behaviour, but
also by designating her as “the mother,” and not as “her mother” or “Helene.”
Despite her desire for independence from her mother, and her goal of leaving her
hometown for “faraway places,” Nel, like Helene, eventually finds herself in the role of
wife and mother. As well as adopting her mother’s roles, Nel also displays many of
Helene’s traits, such as her concern for the upkeep of her household and the disciplin-
ing of her “grimy intractable children.”36 However, the greatest evidence of the genera-
tional continuity between Nel and her mother emerges after the departure of her
husband, Jude. Left alone, Nel replicates Helene’s omnipresence and over-investment,
twisting her love for her children “into something so thick and monstrous she [is]
afraid to show it lest it break lose and smother them with its heavy paw.”37 While Nel’s
two sons love the fact that, because of her need for intimacy, she “[cannot] stop get-
ting in the bed with her children,” her daughter, significantly, does not enjoy her
presence.38 This suggests that the cycle of mother-daughter identification and gender
role repetition that Nel and Helene have each negotiated has begun yet again.
If the daughters of Morrison’s fiction regularly assume a gender role that is charac-
terised by continuity with the mother and her values, the sons in her novels generally
assume an appropriate masculine role despite the father’s predominant or even per-
manent absence. In contrast to the personal identification that marks Nel’s relationship
with her mother, the relationships between boys and their fathers in Morrison’s novels
is commonly characterised by what Chodorow terms “positional identification.” Lack-
ing the emotional and empathic closeness of daughter-mother identification, posi-
tional identification consists in “identification with specific aspects of another’s role,”
and not necessarily with their ideals or personality.39 In assuming the traits and role of
a male, boys in Morrison’s novels may “appropriate those specific forms of the mas-
culinity of their father they fear will otherwise be used against them.”40
34. Morrison, Sula, pp. 17–8.
35. Morrison, Sula, pp. 17–8.
36. Morrison, Sula, pp. 96–7.
37. Morrison, Sula, p. 138.
38. Morrison, Sula, p. 109.
39. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 175–6.
40. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 176.
278“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
In Song of Solomon, the contrast between the respective forms of female and
male gender role identification is apparent in the experience of the children in the
Dead family. Accepting their mother’s valuation of their lighter skin colour and dis-
tinguished ancestry (their grandfather being both a doctor and a man of means), the
Dead girls, Magdalena and Corinthians, assume that their future fulfilment and
financial security is to be found through marriage to “a professional man of color.”41
As Corinthians reflects, it is assumed that she and Magdalena (called Lena) will
“marry well,” and hopes for Corinthians are “especially high since [she has] gone to
college.” Despite Corinthians’ aspirations, however, her college credentials do not
equip her for the wider world of work, but rather revolve around the roles associated
with her gender in a patriarchal society:
Her education had taught her to be an enlightened mother and wife, able to
contribute to the civilization – or in her case the civilizing of her commu-
nity. And if marriage was not achieved, there were alternative roles:
teacher, librarian, or. . . well, something intelligent and high-spirited.42
Corinthians’ examination of the employment options open to her as an educated
woman echoes Chodorow’s argument that “[w]omen’s work in the labor force tends
to extend their housewife, wife, or mother roles and their concern with personal af-
fective ties.”43 While Magdalena seems resigned to a life of domesticity and spinster-
hood, Corinthians suffers a “severe depression” upon discovering that she is “a forty-
two-year-old maker of rose petals” and is unlikely to acquire either the husband or
the career she has hoped for.44 Desperate to “get out of the house” and away from the
hobby that she associates with her mother, Corinthians seeks employment and, be-
ing “[u]nfit for any work other than the making of red velvet roses,” accepts a job as a
maid.45 Magdalena and Corinthians’ ensnarement by a patriarchal system which is
predicated upon the division of labour along gender lines is reflected in the fact that
their brother is unable “to really distinguish them (or their roles) from his mother.”46
Although Milkman’s inability to differentiate between his mother and his sisters
reflects the generational continuity that typifies many mother-daughter relation-
ships, his relationship with his father follows the pattern of positional identification
41. Morrison, Song, p. 188.
42. Morrison, Song, p. 188.
43. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 180.
44. Morrison, Song, p. 189.
45. Morrison, Song, pp. 187–9.
46. Morrison, Song, p. 68.
279ANTHONY WARDE
that is characteristic of masculine identity formation.47 As his father’s employee,
Milkman tries “to do the work the way Macon want[s] it done,” and fears and re-
spects the man who apparently has “no imperfection” and who seems to strengthen
with age.48 Notwithstanding this deep-rooted respect, Milkman feels that he can
“never emulate” his seemingly flawless father since his own body is marked by an
(imaginary) imperfection – one of his legs is, he believes, shorter than the other.
While Milkman views Macon’s body as a model of physical perfection, he refuses
to mimic his father’s appearance or to adopt his interests:
Macon was clean-shaven; Milkman was desperate for a moustache. Macon
wore bow ties; Milkman wore four-in-hands. Macon didn’t part his hair;
Milkman had a part shaved in his. Macon hated tobacco; Milkman tried to
put a cigarette in his mouth every fifteen minutes. Macon hoarded his
money; Milkman gave his away. But he couldn’t help sharing with Macon
his love of good shoes and fine thin socks.49
Even when he usurps the paternal power that has previously been wielded against
him by defending his mother and “deck[ing] his father,”50 Milkman’s identification
with Macon is devoid of empathy and does not extend beyond physical supremacy.
Despite listening to Macon’s motives for striking his wife, Milkman feels “curiously
disassociated from all that he [has] heard”:
As though a stranger that he’d sat down next to on a park bench had turned
to him and begun to relate some intimacy. He was entirely sympathetic to
the stranger’s problems – understood perfectly his view of what had hap-
pened to him – but part of his sympathy came from the fact that he himself
was not involved or in any way threatened by the stranger’s story.51
Milkman’s view of Macon as a stranger, an “alien,” and “another man,” suggests
that, like most males, he identifies with his father’s power and position rather than his
personality. Macon, for his part, transforms the pride and love he experiences as a boy
working “ ‘right alongside his father,’ ” an ex-slave who has bought and built up a farm
of “a hundred and fifty acres,” into a belief that there is only one important thing that
Milkman will ever need to know: “ ‘Own things. And let the things you own own other
47. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 175–6.
48. Morrison, Song, p. 63.
49. Morrison, Song, p. 63.
50. Morrison, Song, p. 69.
51. Morrison, Song, p. 74.
280“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
things. Then you’ll own yourself and other people too.’ ”52 Macon’s single-minded de-
termination to own both property and people suggests that he wishes to assume the
authority and agency that his father has previously enjoyed as a landowner, rather than
adopt or emulate his father’s affectionateness and other personality traits. Such imper-
sonal identification indicates that Macon and Milkman come to view the father less as a
begetter nor someone to whom they are tied by biological, imaginary, or affective
bonds, and more as an embodiment of patriarchal power, or in Lacanian terms, the
Law of the Father.
“Maleness, for its Own Sake”
Where do you get the right to decide our lives? . . . I’ll tell you where. From
that hog’s gut that hangs between your legs. Well, let me tell you something
baby brother: you will need more than that. I don’t know where you will get it
or who will give it to you, but mark my words, you will need more than that.53
The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark where the share of the
logos is wedded to the advent of desire.
One might say that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible
element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the
literal (typographical) sense of the term. . .54
As is evident from the difficulties that Morrison’s protagonists face in assuming and
maintaining sexuality, the respective social standing and characteristics of males and
females are not natural. Rather, the meanings of masculinity and femininity derive
from a socially perpetuated pattern of gender identities and, more precisely, from
myths (embodied in forms as diverse as dolls and songs) circulated in support of this
pattern. Since the assumption of any sexual identity is tenuous and involves the in-
terplay of psychological and sociological factors, any privileging of masculinity over
femininity in Morrison’s novels, although normative, is neither innate nor inevitable.
Morrison’s characters both adhere to and violate this psychoanalytic model, admit-
ting, if not always submitting, to the idea that men are privileged in a system of het-
erosexual hierarchy and hegemony.
52. Morrison, Song, pp. 51, 54.
53. Morrison, Song, p. 215.
54. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection. Alan Sheridan, translator (London: Routledge,
1977), p. 318.
281ANTHONY WARDE
In Sula, patriarchal privilege is implicated in Nel and Sula’s decision, upon dis-
covery of the fact that they are “neither white nor male, and that all freedom and
triumph [are] forbidden to them,” to “set about creating something else to be.”55
Susan Neal Mayberry sees in this passage evidence that the “traditional African
American community is not ready to accept a woman who assumes a man’s free-
dom,” an intolerance eventually voiced by Nel, who, in admonishing the dying Sula,
rejects “the masculine part of herself.”56 A similar view of masculinity as normative
and honoured seems to be implied in Morrison’s account of the acrimony between
Macon Dead and his wife in Song of Solomon: “Each one befuddled by the values of
the other. Each one convinced of his own purity and outraged by the idiocy he saw in
the other.”57 As this description pertains to a man and a woman, the designation of
each party as “he” suggests that, in language, the privileged subject position is that of
the male. Morrison’s use of the pronoun “he” cannot be construed as countenancing
patriarchal privilege or as supporting a system that assumes mankind is male, but is,
rather, indicative of the manner in which the symptoms and supports of patriarchy
insinuate themselves in language.
Fraught as it is with evidence of the assumed ascendancy of males in patriarchal
society, language also lends itself to those who wish to challenge such superiority and
expose its essential hollowness. The aforementioned assertion in Paradise that “one” is
“a woman” and “the other” is “a man” encapsulates the interrogation and subversion of
male dominance that runs throughout Morrison’s work. As Magdalena’s emasculating
remarks to her brother demonstrate, men in Morrison’s novels require more than an
appeal to physiology to justify their “right” to rule over women and society.58 While
Milkman’s “hog’s gut” marks him as male, and thus as a member of the gender group
wielding power in a patriarchal society, it is not in itself the source of that power.
Commenting on the power that patriarchal society erroneously attributes to its male
members, Lacan claims that it is by merit of its visibility that the penis becomes associ-
ated with the phallus, the privileged signifier of the Symbolic order.59 The significance
with which the phallus is endowed derives from its role in liberating the subject from
its imaginary dependence on its mother and projecting it into its lifelong project of
55. Morrison, Sula, p. 52.
56. Susan Neal Mayberry, “Something Other Than a Family Quarrel: The Beautiful Boys in
Morrison’s Sula,” African American Review 37.4 (Winter 2003) 517–33, p.519.
57. Morrison, Song, p. 132.
58. Morrison, Song, p. 215.
59. Lacan, Écrits, p. 318.
282“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
self-development in the symbolic and social orders.60 Ellie Ragland-Sullivan asserts
that although “the Phallus does not refer to the real father, . . . Lacan used this term
to underline the idea that the biological father, the penian part-object, and the phal-
lic differential function are confused in language.”61 Macon plays the part of the fa-
ther in Song of Solomon, separating Milkman from his mother first by forbidding him
to sit on her lap, and later by removing him from the domestic (and traditionally femi-
nine) sphere and introducing him to the (supposedly masculine) world of work and
capitalism.62 Macon’s fulfilment of the phallic function of differentiation, however,
does not prove that male physiology and the phallus are superior or superposable; in
fact, Macon’s body in and of itself bears no more phallic power than the “male doll
with a small chicken bone stuck between its legs” which Pilate places in his office to
deter him from abusing his pregnant wife.63
In Sula, men and male physiology are the subject of Nel and Sula’s interest as
they venture past the pool hall towards the ice cream parlour; it is not ice cream that
the girls want, but rather the sight of the “inchworm smiles” and the “squatting
haunches” of the men who haunt the pool house:
The cream-colored trousers marking with a mere seam the place where the
mystery curled. The smooth vanilla crotches invited them; those lemon-yellow
gabardines beckoned to them. . . . Somewhere beneath all of that daintiness,
chambered in all that neatness, lay the thing that clotted their dreams.64
Nel and Sula’s attraction to the men at the pool hall and to “the thing” that each
of them possess is attributable not only to the girl’s adolescence and sexuality, but
also to their desire to distance themselves from their mothers and their families.65
Although she acknowledges the father’s part in the infant’s development, Chodorow
questions any privileging of males or their organs that rests on either a logical or
biological basis.66 In the development of gender identity, the import of the male
member is always secondary, an offshoot of the infant’s experience of being parented
by the mother:
60. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 320–1.
61. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Ur-
bana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 283.
62. Morrison, Song, pp. 32, 55.
63. Morrison, Song, p. 132.
64. Morrison, Sula, pp. 50–1.
65. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 138.
66. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 145–7.
283ANTHONY WARDE
The penis, or phallus, is a symbol of power or omnipotence, whether you
have one as a sexual organ (as a male), or as a sexual object (as her mother
“possesses” her father’s). A girl wants it for the powers it symbolizes and the
freedom it promises from her previous state of dependence, and not be-
cause it is inherently and obviously better to be masculine.67
Nel, subject to her mother’s manipulation in her father’s absence, pictures her-
self “waiting for some fiery prince.”68 Sula, similarly, lives with her mother, Hannah,
and grandmother, Eva, in a house from which men are absent. In light of the genera-
tional continuity and often inhibitory intimacy that mark the mother-daughter rela-
tionships in their family, it is possible that the Peace women’s “manlove” is, as the
novel suggests, a love of “maleness for its own sake,”69 that is, a love for those gender
and body traits that characterise men and mark their difference from women.
In Morrison’s novels, maternal omnipotence not only endows male members of
patriarchal society with importance and an association with the phallic function of
differentiation, it also results in the devaluation of females and their bodies by male
subjects. While a girl’s assumption of a feminine gender identity is largely in line
with her identification with her mother, a boy’s acquirement of a heterosexual mas-
culine identity means that he “represses those qualities he takes to be feminine in-
side himself, and rejects and devalues women and whatever he considers to be
feminine in the social world.”70 Milkman’s misogyny can be explained from this per-
spective, as he, more than most males, has experienced prolonged dependency on –
or, at least, submission to – his mother, who nurses him past infancy in an attempt
to fulfil her “fantasy” and satisfy her desire to be loved.71
In The Bluest Eye, Cholly comes to devalue women as a result of the dependency
and powerlessness he associates with them. Abandoned by his mother when he is
four days old, Cholly is rescued and raised by his Great Aunt Jimmy, who takes de-
light in reminding him of that fact.72 Although grateful to his aunt, Cholly occasion-
ally appraises his experience of being forced to “sleep with her for warmth in winter
and [seeing] her old, wrinkled breasts sagging in her nightgown,” and wonders
67. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 123.
68. Morrison, Sula, p. 51.
69. Morrison, Sula, p. 41.
70. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 181.
71. Morrison, Song, pp. 13–4.
72. Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 103.
284“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
“whether it would have been just as well to have died.”73 While Cholly’s subjection to
an old woman’s demands makes him question the value of living, his devaluation of all
women can be traced to the impotence he experiences during his first sexual encounter
with a young girl, Darlene. Interrupted by two white hunters during this liaison, Cholly
is forced to repeat, or, rather, “to simulate what [has] gone on before”: he is too terri-
fied to do “more than make believe.”74 Humiliated and emasculated, Cholly does not
consider “directing his hatred towards the hunters,” who are “big, white, armed men,”
but cultivates instead “his hatred of Darlene,” since she is the one “who [has] created
the situation, the one who [has borne] witness to his failure, his impotence.”75
While Cholly, like many other African American men, chooses to blame a
woman for his failure, Morrison insists in an interview with Robert Stepto that “eve-
rybody knows, deep down, that black men were emasculated by white men, period.
And that black woman didn’t take any part in that.”76 Cholly’s sexual failure illus-
trates Jean Walton’s assertion that “though the penis can be attributed to all men (as
opposed to women) . . . the phallus cannot.”77 If Milkman’s economic standing places
him in proximity to the phallic power of capitalistic society, then Cholly occupies a
much more marginal position, that of a poor African American boy standing prone
before two white gun-wielding men. Like many African American men who possess a
penis but lack the means to assert themselves as men, Cholly is “a figure whose rela-
tion to the phallus, as signifier of white male privilege in a racialized, patriarchal
society” is extremely tenuous.78
Women’s mothering is not only implicated in men’s subjection and devaluation of
women, but is also entailed in the positioning of women as other by men in Morrison’s
novels. Lacan ascribes the myths and fears that the male subject associates with
“Woman” to the fact that females, unlike males, do not have an affiliation with the
phallus, and have therefore no “signifier” for their sexuality.79 Chodorow, in contrast,
follows Karen Horney in attributing the myths and misogyny that characterise patriar-
73. Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 103.
74. Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 116.
75. Morrison, Bluest Eye, p. 118.
76. Robert B. Stepto, “ ‘Intimate Things in Place’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in
Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, eds. Henry Louis Gates , Jr. and K.A.
Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 378–95, p. 384.
77. Jean Walton, “Re-placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse: Founding Narra-
tives of Feminism,” Critical Inquiry 21.4 (Summer, 1995) 775–804, p. 784.
78. Walton, p. 784.
79. Ragland-Sullivan, pp. 286–7.
285ANTHONY WARDE
chy as manifestations of men’s deeper dread of women and of “a masculine fear and
terror of omnipotence that arises as one major consequence of their early caretaking
and socialization by women.”80 However, as a result of the Oedipal issues involved in
the boy’s individuation this terror is always ambivalent, as the boy fears the mother
and yet also finds her “seductive and attractive.” In an attempt to cope with their simul-
taneous fear of and attraction towards women, men develop certain “psychological and
cultural/ideological mechanisms,” such as polarising women as witches and angels.81
In Song of Solomon, these opposing attributes of the woman as other are de-
tectable in Milkman’s encounter with Circe, the almost mythic midwife who har-
bours Macon and Pilate after their father is killed by the very people she works for.82
Onomastic critics would undoubtedly draw attention to the fact that Circe is a sor-
ceress from Greek mythology, who, in Homer’s Odyssey, detains Odysseus on her
island and transforms all of his companions into pigs. The Circe of Song of Solomon
shares with her Homeric counterpart an association with witchcraft, the supernatu-
ral, and, most importantly, with the power to emasculate the males she encounters:
He had had dreams as a child, dreams every child had, of the witch who
chased him down dark alleys, between lawn trees, and finally into rooms
from which he could not escape. . . . So when he saw the woman at the top
of the stairs there was no way for him to resist climbing up toward her out-
stretched hands, her fingers spread wide for him, her mouth gaping open
for him, her fingers devouring him. . . . [H]e knew that always, always at the
very instant of the pounce or the gummy embrace he would wake with a
scream and an erection. Now he had only the erection.83
This seemingly surreal passage can be interpreted in light of the dread of and
attraction to women that mothering ingrains in certain of Morrison’s male sub-
jects. In the case of Milkman, the amativeness and terror that he associates with
the dream of the witch may be connected with the oedipal overtones of the nursing
he has been subjected to by his mother. Part of the pleasure Ruth receives from her
“secret indulgences” comes from the room in which it occurs, a little room inhab-
ited by a “dark greenness” which is “made by the evergreen that press[es] against
the window and filter[s] the light.”84 As a child Milkman comes to this little room
80. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 183.
81. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 183.
82. Morrison, Song, p. 238.
83. Morrison, Song, p. 239.
84. Morrison, Song, p. 13.
286“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
“reluctantly, as to a chore,” and suspects these meetings with his mother are
“strange and wrong.”85 It is perhaps telling, then, that the witch who haunts Milk-
man’s dreams chases him “between lawn trees, [and] into rooms from which he
cannot escape.”86
“A Lover Was Not a Comrade”
[The men] had merged into one large personality: the same language of
love, the same entertainments of love, the same cooling of love. Whenever
she introduced her private thoughts into their rubbings or goings, they
hooded their eyes. They taught her nothing but love tricks, shared nothing
but worry, gave nothing but money. She had been looking all along for a
friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade
and could never be – for a woman.87
Freud originally (“a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psycho-
logically”), and psychoanalytic thinkers after him all point to a way in which
women and men, though “meant for each other,” and usually looking for in-
timacy with each other, are, because of the social organization of parenting,
not meant for each other, and do not fulfil each other’s needs.88
Given that the subject’s assumption of a gender identity is fraught with difficulties
and is neither natural nor innate, it is unsurprising that relationships between those
subjects who identify themselves as masculine and those subjects who identify them-
selves as feminine are often marked by misunderstanding and conflict. Such is cer-
tainly the case in Morrison’s novels, with conflict between Cholly and Pauline
Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, marital breakdown between Eva and BoyBoy and be-
tween Nel and Jude in Sula, and acrimony between Macon and Ruth Dead in Song of
Solomon. So marked is this gender conflict in Morrison’s fiction that it prompts
Louis Menard to gloss Morrison’s proposed title for Paradise – “War” – in referring
to “The War between Men and Women” in that novel.89
85. Morrison, Song, pp. 13–4.
86. Morrison, Song, p. 239.
87. Morrison, Sula, pp. 120–1.
88. Chodorow, Feminism, p. 77.
89. Menard, Louis, “The War between Men and Women,” The New Yorker 73.42 (1998)
78–84.
287ANTHONY WARDE
If, however, it is misguided to believe that sexuality is biologically based or that
men and women are meant for each other, it is equally erroneous to attribute dis-
parities in male-female relationships in Morrison’s works to natural differences.
Chodorow asserts that the disparities between masculine and feminine gender iden-
tity are attributable to the differential treatment of girls and boys by mothers and to
the distinct preoedipal and Oedipal issues experienced by each gender.90 Whatever
its importance for the subject’s sexual orientation, the greatest significance and ef-
fects of the Oedipal complex, Chodorow insists, are found in “the constitution of
different forms of ‘relational potential’ in people of different genders.”91 Since the
development of feminine identity is characterised by a prolonged preoedipal rela-
tionship with the mother, women generally develop a sense of self in relationships,
and acquire strong emotional and relational needs and capacities.92 Men, in contrast,
“are more likely to have been pushed out of the preoedipal relationship, and to have
had to curtail their sense of empathic tie with their mother” in order to attain a sense
of separateness and masculinity.93
As a result of the asymmetry in the experiences of males and females in their re-
lationships with their mothers, girls develop “a basis for empathy built into their
primary definition of self in a way that boys do not.” Because they have a need for
intimacy and empathy that men, because of their Oedipal separation and gender role
training, are generally incapable of supplying, most women, although erotically het-
erosexual, tend to establish a less exclusive and secondary emotional attachment to
men.94 This is reflected in the disillusionment that Sula experiences in her relation-
ships with men who are unable to share anything but worry or give anything but
money, and who “[hood] their eyes” whenever she attempts to convey her “private
thoughts” to them.95 Since masculinity entails the repression of relational capacities,
it is inevitable that for a (heterosexual) woman, “a lover [is] not a comrade and [can]
never be.”96
Elsewhere in Sula, the marriage of Nel and Jude encapsulates the chasm be-
tween men and women, and between the desires each gender seeks to satisfy in a
relationship with the other. Jude seeks to be married since he needs “some of his
90. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 169–70.
91. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 166.
92. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 199–200.
93. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 166.
94. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 167.
95. Morrison, Sula, p. 121.
96. Morrison, Sula, p. 121.
288“ONE WAS A WOMAN, THE OTHER A MAN”
appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized,” but “mostly he wants some-
one to care about his hurt, care very deeply,” and “if he [is] to be a man, that some-
one can no longer be his mother.”97 Jude fears leading an emasculated life as “a
waiter hanging around a kitchen like a woman,” and views marriage as an arena in
which he can prove his masculinity as “the head of a household pinned to an unsatis-
factory job out of necessity.”98 Jude also wishes to gratify his desire for an exclusive,
dual relationship, and takes Nel as his wife with the certainty that the “two of them
together [will] make one Jude.”99 Testifying to the projections that reveal themselves
in the subject’s imaginary relations with the other, Jude’s actions and the motives
behind them also reflect Chodorow’s observation that, as a result of their treatment
by the mother in infancy, “men look to relationships with women for narcissistic-
phallic reassurance rather than for mutual affirmation and love.”100
Ironically, Nel is attracted to Jude because he provides her with a “new feeling of
being needed by someone who saw her singly.”101 This reassertion of her sense of
individuality is important, since her infant relationship with her overbearing mother,
like the mother-daughter relationships studied by Deutsch, has left her with a fear of
merging, and her relationship with Sula is “so close, they themselves [have] difficulty
distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s.”102 Chodorow, however, supports
Deutsch in stating that relationships with other women are essential for a woman:
Some women . . . always need a best friend with whom they share all
confidences about their heterosexual relationships. These relationships are
one way of resolving and recreating the mother-daughter bond and are an
expression of women’s general relational capacities and definition of self in
relationship.103
While allaying Nel’s unease regarding her boundaries, therefore, Sula’s depar-
ture also deprives Nel of the empathy and emotional attachment she needs. Fortu-
nately for Nel, however, Sula returns after a ten-year absence, and their reunion is
“like getting the use of an eye back, having a cataract removed.”104
97. Morrison, Sula, p. 82.
98. Morrison, Sula, p. 83.
99. Morrison, Sula, p. 83.
100. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 196.
101. Morrison, Sula, p. 84.
102. Morrison, Sula, p. 83.
103. Chodorow, Reproduction, p. 200.
104. Morrison, Sula, p. 95.
289ANTHONY WARDE
Jude’s belief that marriage will cast him in the role of breadwinner for his family
and will thus offset the emasculating effects of a job that requires him to “[hang]
around a kitchen like a woman”105 draws attention to an area of conflict between men
and women in Morrison’s fiction which revolves, not around relational capacities,
but around the world of work. Chodorow suggests that an intrinsic element in the
perpetuation of gender identities is the sexual division of labour. While generational
continuity and gender role identification generally ensure that the girl will adopt her
mother’s domestic roles, the boy, who has identified away from his mother and
achieved a sense of separateness, is enabled and expected to enter into the capitalist
work environment.106
The belief that men are – or should be – independent and mobile is one of the
motivating factors behind Eva’s killing of her son, Plum. Returning from war service
to the home where he has “floated in a constant swaddle of love and affection as a
child,” Plum is killed by his mother not only because she fears that he wishes to re-
turn to her womb, but also since he is unable to “leave [her] and go on and live and
be a man.”107 As Patricia Hill Collins notes, however, the inculcation of such gender
roles creates conflicts between African-American men and women, since they are
based on a white “normative family household [that] ideally consists of a working
father who earns enough to allow his spouse and dependent children to withdraw
from the paid labor force.”108 While this ideal, as seen previously, is an important
element of Jude’s desire to marry, it is often unattainable for African-American men,
since racial prejudice creates “reversed roles for men and women.”109 This role rever-
sal arises when African-American women are employed while African-American men
“have difficulty finding steady work,” and results in the charge that “Black women
emasculate Black men by failing to be submissive, dependent, “feminine” women.110
In The Bluest Eye, this transposition of the position of men and women in the divi-
sion of labour leads to conflict between Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. Although
Cholly feels free “to take a woman’s insults . . . to be gentle when she [is] sick, or mop
her floor, for she [knows] what and where his maleness [is],”111 his sense of masculin-
105. Morrison, Sula, p. 83.
106. Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 178–90.
107. Morrison, Sula, pp. 45, 72.
108. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 46–7.
109. Collins, p. 75.
110. Collins, p. 75.
111. Morrison, Bluest Eye, pp. 125–6.
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